Saturday, November 26, 2011 8:53:31 PM@BlankTom I don't understand your point about achillies and the tortoise, i think you've misunderstood the problem. Achilles isn't stopping everytime he reaches the tortoise to allow it to advance, therefore his "intent" as in the point he's 'aiming' for, doesn't factor into the problem at all. All you need to know is that achilles and the tortoise are both travelling parrelel at constant speeds, where achilles is aiming for is irrelevent. The Paradox is just highlighting that an infinite number of steps must occur before achilles can overtake the tortoise. And an infinite number of steps would of course take, infinity to complete, therefore rendering all movement impossible. Of course movement IS possible, so what we're left with is a lovely befuddling paradox.

Saturday, November 26, 2011 8:56:33 AMThe infinit hotel: The problem with this, is that infinity does not act as a regular number, it's more of a concept. Basically something that is infinitly large is not bounded. You can have a hotel with an infinit number of room, and you can have an infinit number of guest but you can never say this hotel is "full". That would require there be an upper bound to the amount of people who can be in the hotel. If that were the case, then there wouldn't be an infinit number of rooms.

Saturday, November 26, 2011 8:43:58 AMThe Chinese Room: I'm not sure i understnad why people consider the man inside the room as the robot. I would consider the room itself the robot. The man is just a component of the entire system. The instruction, the chinese characters and even the door that allows the characters to pass in and out should all be considered as a whole when talking about this example.

In anycase, aren't we all just immitating intelligence? We have a preconcieved notiong of what "inetlligence" is and we follow instruction on how to achieve that. Our instructions come in the form or learning and experience and are stored in our own manual. I think the only reason we can't have intelligent machines is because we can't concieve of instructions complex enough to truely replicate our own minds.

Saturday, November 26, 2011 8:29:46 AMHere's my thought on a couple of the interesting ones: The Achilies/Tortoise one: The issue with this paradox is that it's only considering two points - Achilies location and the Tortoise's location - as in the Tortoise is the End Point that Achilies is trying to acchive. However Achillies is not attempting to reach the tortoise, He's attempting to get to a point just past the finish line. So once Achilies passes the tortoise he is no longer trying to reach the tortoise, he is trying to get to a point beyond the tortoise.

Think of this another way: When you run a race, you're not trying to get "to the finiish line" you're trying to get to a point *past* the finish line. You never see a marathon runner run the race only to stop at the exact point his body touches the finish riboon. So on order to "pass" something, let it be a tortoise, the finish line a slow driver, etc, there needs to be point beyond the "thing" you want to pass.

Saturday, November 26, 2011 7:55:20 AM"I'm wondering what the difference is between the human brain and a sufficiently intelligent robot."

Who says there needs to be a difference? There isn't one.

"Granted, it has been stated that an entity can never create another entity of equal intelligence, only one of less intelligence,"

Said by whom? What's makes them the authority? This is easily debunked. Let's say humans are able to invent a machine that makes an exact clone of a human being. Then suppose that someone invents a way to "edit" the clone on a computer before creating it. They could experiment, screw around, clear neural pathways, etc, and create hundreds of different clones, killing the ones that turn out dumb. That would be a very simple way for humans to create beings of superior intelligence.

Because humans are able to identify their own weaknesses, it IS possible for humans to create superior beings.

Friday, November 25, 2011 9:25:09 PMEveryone's "now" is subjective and relative, as our great thinkers have surmised. So now is not regulated by some quantitative position, but "flowers" in it's many points of observation. I really dislike using the verb flowers. Or blossoms. But that is how reality works. Naturally an "observation" that collapses state need not be a human observation.

Friday, November 25, 2011 7:52:21 PMNicely said @janus_games! Too bad the cahr limit cut you off a bit. @Gerry1 - Nice Doxies! @Draculya: Well Zeno (With a Zed eh?) Of Elea was a philosopher, he worked within what math was known at the time. THAT is why his Turtle Paradox worked back then - not enough math to disprove it. The Arrow is way neater!

Barjavel: A time traveller can move at any relative 'speed' relative to another from zero to infinity, but not negative. There is no such thing as the grandfather paradox, except in philosophy.

Searle/Turing: Searle simply disproves Turing's point about a computer possessing intelligence. Intelligence is a matter of definition and lies on a continuum between a single neuron and somewhere way past human potential.

Hilbert:

Inf+Inf=Inf 2.Inf=Inf

It's not that hard but it shows how the concept of infinity does not behave in a conventional way.

Einstein: Yes, time dilation. That's no paradox.

SchrÃ¶dinger: The cat exists in only one state, alive or dead, you just can't determine which. Quantum particles simultaneously exist in multiple states. You just have to deal with that.

Friday, November 25, 2011 7:08:58 PMAs far as schroedinger's cat, this little movie actually doesn't represent the actual story. Schroedinger presented the paradox to demonstrate the absurdity of the superstate idea. He wasn't a clever advocate, he was mocking it.

The truth though, is that the math works out when you do it that way, so rather than try to understand the why, they put it on the shelf and said, "We'll come back to that later when we have time and more info." Unfortunately, it's so convenient that we've only really just started coming back to why the superposition idea actually works.

Still so much to learn.

Time travel may be easy, but one way. While they're still not sure it's even possible, we're pretty sure that if it is possible, it's already part of the past, and that somehow you'd be obstructed from killing your grandfather. The current idea is that the past is immutable, because it's already happened, even your trip, which you must then take, because you we

Actually both are important factors in hard AI. The Chinese Room (CR) means that all the rules are prescripted. Look at something like iGod or even Siri and you can see how the argument actually falls apart. What's more important though is whether semantic meaning is applied.

What's semantic meaning and why's it important?

Well it's the difference between seeing "Hi" and looking up the response in a table or applying a set of rules to parse the statement and look it up in a preset list of rules, and assigning meaning to the words, formulating the solution, and creating a unique response. In order for the CR to work, there must be an large set of rules for EVERY situation, which just can't be done, which is why anything modeled on the CR falls apart.

It's not just storage that makes something intelligent. Because unless you can apply meaning before, then at best you're just searching a solution space.

Friday, November 25, 2011 6:30:31 PM@iamaguitargod: Thank you for getting it! It's nice to know someone out there is as big a geek as me! (it's supposed to say "noW that's spooky" not "not" eh?) @SarahofBorg: But the guy in the Room cannot actually speak or understand Chinese, he's just sending notes, a limited form of communication. He's immitating fluency just the way a computer immitates "thinking".

Friday, November 25, 2011 6:19:48 PMThe chinese room one is interesting. If you look something up in a book, you don't actually know it already. If you look something up in your memory, you know it. The only difference between using a book and using your memory is that your memory is hard-wired into your brain. For a computer, it would be like the difference between a CD (book) and the hard drive (memory.) If something is on the hard drive, the computer knows it. If it's on a CD and not actually copied onto the hard drive, the computer doesn't know it. Therefore, a hard drive functions exactly like a human memory in terms of knowledge storage, and therefore can be a part of what defines intelligence. Yet, memory doesn't define intelligence, or we'd all be walking books with no function beyond storing information. We act upon that information to make a decision. Computers also do that. Therefore, that alone can define intelligence.